Standard Deviations: Flawed Assumptions, Tortured Data, and Other Ways to Lie with Statistics

As Nobel Prize-winning economist Ronald Coase once cynically observed, "If you torture data long enough, it will confess." Lying with statistics is a time-honored con. In Standard Deviations, economics professor Gary Smith walks us through the various tricks and traps that people use to back up their own crackpot theories. Sometimes, the unscrupulous deliberately try to mislead us. Other times, the well-intentioned are blissfully unaware of the mischief they are committing.

Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data

From batting averages and political polls to game shows and medical research, the real-world application of statistics continues to grow by leaps and bounds. How can we catch schools that cheat on standardized tests? How does Netflix know which movies you'll like? What is causing the rising incidence of autism? As best-selling author Charles Wheelan shows us in Naked Statistics, the right data and a few well-chosen statistical tools can help us answer these questions and more.

Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die

An introduction for everyone. Rather than a "how to" for hands-on techies, this book - now in its revised and updated edition - serves lay listeners and experts alike by covering new case studies and the latest state-of-the-art techniques. In this rich, fascinating, and surprisingly accessible introduction, leading expert Eric Siegel reveals how predictive analytics works and how it affects everyone every day.

Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are

By the end of on average day in the early 21st century, human beings searching the Internet will amass eight trillion gigabytes of data. This staggering amount of information - unprecedented in history - can tell us a great deal about who we are - the fears, desires, and behaviors that drive us, and the conscious and unconscious decisions we make. From the profound to the mundane, we can gain astonishing knowledge about the human psyche that less than 20 years ago seemed unfathomable.

Thinking Statistically

Thinking Statistically is the book that shows you how to think like a statistician, without worrying about formal statistical techniques. Along the way we learn how selection bias can explain why your boss doesn't know he sucks (even when everyone else does); how to use Bayes' theorem to decide if your partner is cheating on you; and why Mark Zuckerberg should never be used as an example for anything.

Keeping Up with the Quants: Your Guide to Understanding and Using Analytics

Welcome to the age of data. No matter your interests (sports, movies, politics), your industry (finance, marketing, technology, manufacturing), or the type of organization you work for (big company, nonprofit, small start-up) - your world is awash with data. As a successful manager today, you must be able to make sense of all this information. You need to be conversant with analytical terminology and methods and able to work with quantitative information. This audiobook promises to become your "quantitative literacy" guide.

The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

Under the aegis of machine learning in our data-driven machine age, computers are programming themselves and learning about - and solving - an extraordinary range of problems, from the mundane to the most daunting. Today it is machine learning programs that enable Amazon and Netflix to predict what users will like, Apple to power Siri's ability to understand voices, and Google to pilot cars.

Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction

Everyone would benefit from seeing further into the future, whether buying stocks, crafting policy, launching a new product, or simply planning the week's meals. Unfortunately, people tend to be terrible forecasters. As Wharton professor Philip Tetlock showed in a landmark 2005 study, even experts' predictions are only slightly better than chance. However, an important and underreported conclusion of that study was that some experts do have real foresight.

The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail - but Some Don't

Nate Silver built an innovative system for predicting baseball performance, predicted the 2008 election within a hair’s breadth, and became a national sensation as a blogger - all by the time he was 30. The New York Times now publishes FiveThirtyEight.com, where Silver is one of the nation’s most influential political forecasters. Drawing on his own groundbreaking work, Silver examines the world of prediction, investigating how we can distinguish a true signal from a universe of noisy data.

Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions

All our lives are constrained by limited space and time, limits that give rise to a particular set of problems. What should we do, or leave undone, in a day or a lifetime? How much messiness should we accept? What balance of new activities and familiar favorites is the most fulfilling? These may seem like uniquely human quandaries, but they are not: computers, too, face the same constraints, so computer scientists have been grappling with their version of such problems for decades.

Machine Learning: The New AI: The MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series

In this audiobook, machine learning expert Ethem Alpaydin offers a concise overview of the subject for the general listener, describing its evolution, explaining important learning algorithms, and presenting example applications. Alpaydin offers an account of how digital technology advanced from number-crunching mainframes to mobile devices, putting today's machine learning boom in context.

Fortune's Formula: The Untold Story of the Scientific Betting System That Beat the Casinos and Wall Street

In 1956 two Bell Labs scientists discovered the scientific formula for getting rich. One was mathematician Claude Shannon, neurotic father of our digital age, whose genius is ranked with Einstein's. The other was John L. Kelly Jr., a Texas-born gun-toting physicist. Together they applied the science of information theory - the basis of computers and the Internet - to the problem of making as much money as possible as fast as possible.

Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life, in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies

Visionary physicist Geoffrey West is a pioneer in the field of complexity science, the science of emergent systems and networks. The term complexity can be misleading, however, because what makes West's discoveries so beautiful is that he has found an underlying simplicity that unites the seemingly complex and diverse phenomena of living systems, including our bodies, our cities, and our businesses.

Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future

We live in strange times. A machine plays the strategy game Go better than any human; upstarts like Apple and Google destroy industry stalwarts such as Nokia; ideas from the crowd are repeatedly more innovative than corporate research labs. MIT's Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson know what it takes to master this digital-powered shift: we must rethink the integration of minds and machines, of products and platforms, and of the core and the crowd.

Game-Changer: Game Theory and the Art of Transforming Strategic Situations

The aim of David McAdams’s Game-Changer is nothing less than to empower you with this wisdom - not just to win in every strategic situation (or “game”) you face but to change those games and the ecosystems in which they reside to transform your life and our lives together for the better.

A Simple Introduction to Data Science

Lars Nielsen and Noreen Burlingame provide a brief, understandable, user-friendly guide to all aspects of Data Science. The authors address the various skills required, the key steps in the Data Science process, software technology related to the effective practice of Data Science, and the best rising academic programs for training in the field.

The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes' Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy

Bayes' rule appears to be a straightforward, one-line theorem: by updating our initial beliefs with objective new information, we get a new and improved belief. To its adherents, it is an elegant statement about learning from experience. To its opponents, it is subjectivity run amok. Sharon Bertsch McGrayne here explores this controversial theorem and the human obsessions surrounding it.

More Damned Lies and Statistics: How Numbers Confuse Public Issues

More Damned Lies and Statistics encourages all of us to think in a more sophisticated and skeptical manner about how statistics are used to promote causes, create fear, and advance particular points of view. Best identifies different sorts of numbers that shape how we think about public issues: missing numbers are relevant but overlooked; confusing numbers bewilder when they should inform; scary numbers play to our fears about the present and the future.

The Intelligent Web: Search, Smart Algorithms, and Big Data

As we use the Web for social networking, shopping, and news, we leave a personal trail. These days, linger over a Web page selling lamps, and they will turn up at the advertising margins as you move around the Internet, reminding you, tempting you to make that purchase. Search engines such as Google can now look deep into the data on the Web to pull out instances of the words you are looking for. And there are pages that collect and assess information to give you a snapshot of changing political opinion.

Dueling with Kings: High Stakes, Killer Sharks, and the Get-Rich Promise of Daily Fantasy Sports

Daniel Barbarisi quits his job as the New York Yankees beat writer for The Wall Street Journal and begins a quest: to join the top 1 percent of Daily Fantasy Sports ("DFS") players, the so-called "sharks", and figure out whether DFS is on the level - while maybe cashing in along the way. DFS is fantasy sports on steroids. It's the domain of bitter rivals FanDuel and DraftKings, online juggernauts who turned a legal loophole into a billion-dollar industry by allowing sports fans to bet piles of cash constructing fantasy teams.

How to Lie with Statistics

Darrell Huff's celebrated classic How to Lie With Statistics is a straightforward and engaging guide to understanding the manipulation and misrepresentation of information that could be lurking behind every graph, chart, and infographic. Originally published in 1954, it remains as relevant and necessary as ever in our digital world, where information is king - and as easy to distort and manipulate as it is to access.

Big Data: Using Smart Big Data, Analytics and Metrics to Make Better Decisions and Improve Performance

Get smart - learn to convert the promise of Big Data into real-world results. There is so much buzz around big data. We all need to know what it is and how it works. But what will set you apart from the rest is actually knowing how to use big data to get solid, real-world business results - and putting that in place to improve performance. Big Data shows you how to implement the same practices that leading firms have used to access new dimensions of profitability.

Claudio B. Kerber says:"It would deserve an A (if it was a school paper)"

Publisher's Summary

Why would a casino try and stop you from losing? How can a mathematical formula find your future spouse? Would you know if a statistical analysis blackballed you from a job you wanted?

Today, number crunching affects your life in ways you might never imagine. In this lively and groundbreaking new audiobook, economist Ian Ayres shows how today's best and brightest organizations are analyzing massive databases at lightening speed to provide greater insights into human behavior. They are the Super Crunchers. From Internet sites like Google and Amazon that know your tastes better than you do, to a physician's diagnosis and your child's education, to boardrooms and government agencies, this new breed of decision-maker is calling the shots. And they are delivering staggeringly accurate results. How can a football coach evaluate a player without ever seeing him play? Want to know whether the price of an airline ticket will go up or down before you buy? How can a formula out-predict wine experts in determining the best vintages? Super crunchers have the answers.

In this brave new world of equation versus expertise, Ayres shows us the benefits and risks, who loses and who wins, and how super crunching can be used to help, not manipulate, us. Gone are the days of solely relying on intuition to make decisions. No businessperson, consumer, or student who wants to stay ahead of the curve should make another keystroke without listening to Super Crunchers.

There is an old expression, "the man who knows 'how' will always have a job... reporting to the man that knows 'why'".

This is a fantastic book on the 'what' and 'why' of statistical analysis but if you are looking for a book on 'how' to do a regression analysis, you would want to find a different book.

I teach Six Sigma Black Belt classes and after listening to this book I ordered 25 copies to give to everyone in a class I am teaching. What I really liked about this book is that the author uses a wide variety of examples, from medicine to casinos to car dealers to credit cards to hiring practices, etc. etc. In each example, the author explains how data mining and number crunching has been used to make amazingly accurate predictions that most experts in that particular field did not think possible.

The book is fascinating from beginning to end. It is also a little Orwellian in places as you begin to realize that the surveillance technology show cased in books such as "1984" and movies such as "Minority Report" are much closer to reality than most people realize.

Between audible.com and traditional books, I read/listen to about 30 books a year and I would place this book in my top 5 favorite list over the past couple of years.

This was an extremely intersting book on how the analysis of information is used to improve decision making, sales campaigns, medical decisions etc. It demonstrates the power of collecting objective information in virtually all endeavors to assess the success of your decisions and how to make the next decision. There is virtually no actual math or technical descriptions about how information is collected or how it is analyzed - most just making the case that you should collect the data and that you should analyze it. In this sense, it is not a 'how to' book but rather 'why you should' book. Although I am great believer in this approach and in fact, do it for a living, after about the 2/3 mark, I found that the book became a bit tedious as there many examples of the same thing and there was little description of how people are actually collecting information.
I realize these types of books are difficult to write because they try and balance information and entertainment with minimal actual technical detail. However, I thought there should have more technical detail in fewer examples. I am guessing that readers attracted to this book have more than a passing intested in the technology and methods.

Super Crunchers has a lot of interesting examples of using statistics effectively. Many of the examples are not really Big Data, just normal old statistics with normal old number crunching. Only a few were really examples of SUPER crunching.

I found the author more than a little gung ho on the subject of Super Crunching, one sided, a bit self promoting, and my least favorite, at bit axe grinding. There was no value in the John Lott/Mary Rosh story other than to kick an opponent who is already down. Ayres spends little time looking at the potentially problematic aspects of super crunching either social, political, or technical. He does not mention the garbage in garbage out problem and seems to wave away most other downsides. I did learn a few things from Super Crunchers but I much preferred, and learned more from, The Numerati. It seems the author wants the book to be like Freakanomics which it is not.

The narration was quite good dealing well with some pretty challenging text.

Wow...what an awesome book! I think the author did a fantastic job of making the subject matter approachable. This book is written to an audience that is educated, but doesn't assume that you are a mathematics wizard.

I came away with a greater understanding of "number crunching" from both a perspective of understanding the science, and understanding its effects on our everyday lives.

If you are interested in this sort of material, I think Mr. Ayers book is a fabulous place to dive in.

I purchased this audiobook hoping it would be as good as Freakonomics by Steven Levitt, but ended up somewhat disappointed with Supercrunchers. I definitely like the case that is made for data driven decision making, but found too many negative points to warrant a rating above 3 (out of 5).

There is not enough business relevance in the book, as there is way too much talk of topics like evidence based medicine which do not necessarily appeal to business people. In some parts of the book, the audiobook adaptation is poor, as the narrator tries to take the listener through bullet points and hard to understand quizzes. Lastly, I found the book very preachy and rambling on the "big brother is watching you" theme.

Fortunately, towards the end, the book made a very compelling case for practical application of relevant statistics in the popular press, with the 2 standard deviation discussion. A good ending to an otherwise average book.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and felt it was one of best business books that I have heard in the last 5 years.

I enjoyed Freakonomics. It was interesting but had little impact on my daily or professional life. Within the first hour of this book, I could see how the subject matter could be applied to my company. Before even finishing the book, we have initiated two projects to install data driven decision making. The national association for my trade has also agreed to my request to gather transactional data from our membership.

I also particularly enjoyed the author's discussion of Bayes' Theorem and standard deviations towards the end of the book. These are great tools for understanding, analyzing and questioning statitistical references reported in the media.

If you are looking for a light and entertaining book, I would not recommend this one. If you are a business manager, executive or owner looking for proven ways to analyze and improve your business than this book is for you.

This books seems more like a mediocre written Doctoral Thesis than a real book. It tries to be interesting and does have some good theories and points. Could have been summarized in 2 hours instead of 6. I almost stopped listening to it. DEFINITELY NOT like Freakanomics or Blink.

This book shows how all forms of business, medicine, the law, and social activities are being measured, analyzed, and optimized. It is important to recognize that decisions by hunches is a dying practice.

I am loving this book. But, at 42:09 seconds in chapter 1, the narrator says "Nalph Rader reads Mother Jones. " I listened twice to confirm. Such a lot of good work by the author negated by unprofessional narration and sloppy direction. I can only imagine what is to come

Good but not great - Many curiousities are described which have come about in the age of super processing and data storage capability. Some insight into the suprisingly competitive world of stats based economists

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